Edward Bernays Inventing Public Relations

A Lucky Strike advert from the 1930s showing the supposed health benefits of smoking. Source: tobacco.stanford.edu, available here.

Edward Bernays’ Green Campaign for Lucky Strike.
The women who smoked In the 1930s didn’t like the green color of the Lucky Strike packages. Edward Bernays set up a major campaign “to convince women that green was the new black.” With assistance from editors at Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, green began to dominate the fashion world. He came up with the “Green Ball” held in 1934 in New York, featuring some of the city’s most prominent socialites.” (read more neatorama.com)

Edward Bernays for Lucky Strike.
In the late 1920s, American Tobacco Company chairman George Washington Hill wanted to gain the female market for his Lucky Strike cigarettes; so he hired Edward Bernays. Bernays PR company came up in the with the idea to market cigarettes as ‘Torches of Freedom’ Bare in mind that in the 19th century smoking for women in public was not done at all.
During the New York Easter Parade in 1929, “a young woman named Bertha Hunt stepped out into the crowded fifth avenue and created a scandal by lightning a Lucky Strike cigarette. The incident was highlighted even more because the press had been informed in advance of Hunt’s course of actions, and had been provided with appropriate leaflets and pamphlets. What they did not know was that Hunt was Bernays’s secretary and that this was the first in a long line of events that was aimed at getting women to puff. Bernays proclaimed that smoking was a form of liberation for women, their chance to express their new found strength and freedom.” (read more yourstory.com) That worked well! Lucky Strike sold “40 billion cigarettes in 1930 compared to 14 billion just five years earlier” (read more) historyisnowmagazine.com

It’s things-from-the-past-you-should-see-week, an educational program at Mimi Berlin.

Veronica Lake’s Hairstyle

From pin-up to patriot.
About Ms Lake’s hairstyle before and during the second World War: taming Veronica’s cascading blond manes.
Veronica Lake and her famous and very populair peek-a-boo or witch-lock hairstyle in 1942 (image via lisawallerrogerss)

Veronica Lake was so populair in the forties that women copied her hairstyle. In the clip below (is it propaganda or plain advertising?) Ms Lake was set an example for women who had to wear safety hats while working at the factory during the second World War. Because “The Lake’s eyeview is entirely out of place on a war production plant”/ “Uncontrolled hair will never stay in place”/”the rhytm of precision work can be upset resulting in faulty work”.

Veronica Lake “put glamour in it’s proper wartime place” and changed her hairstyle on camera in an, ironically, German-like-bunroll-style which was also cute but not so much sexy. The poor factory girls however had to put on even less sexy and seriously ugly hats at work. The, safe, uniforms were sold as “Industrial Fashions” to women in the USA.

Veronica Lake Seen From Above

Have you ever seen the queen of blonde manes from above? No?
This image by Bob Landry was also new to us.
Victoria Lake used to be very populair for her hair but this picture is next level hair adoration……“View looking down on the glorious, wavy honey-blond hair of actress Veronica Lake as she shows that it is parted on the left side, at home. (Photo by Bob Landry/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)” (Image via GettyImages)

Arlene Dahl

“Arlene Carol Dahl (born August 11, 1925 or 1928) is an American actress and former MGM contract star, who achieved notability during the 1950s. She has three children, the eldest of whom is actor Lorenzo Lamas.After her acting career Ms Dahl Dahl began writing a syndicated beauty column in 1952, and opened Arlene Dahl Enterprises in 1954, marketing cosmetics and designer lingerie. After closing her company in 1967, she began working as a vice president at ad agency Kenyon and Eckhardt that same year. Dahl moved to Sears Roebuck as director of beauty products in 1970, earning nearly $750,000 annually, but left in 1975 to found her short-lived fragrance company Dahlia. She entered the field of astrology in the 1980s, writing a syndicated column and later operating a premium phoneline company. Dahl has written more than two dozen books on the topics of beauty and astrology.” (wikipedia)